This invention relates generally to beverage containers, and more particularly but not by way of limitation, to beverage containers and/or labels for beverage containers that include variable printed indicia to be used either alone, or in combination with other types of printed indicia such as static printing.
Merchants and manufacturers have long used games of various sorts to promote their products and services. Most often, the purchaser of a product will be interested in the label in conjunction with the purchase. A very wide variety of interesting labels including those with popular images, are popular and their proliferation suggests that they are at least modestly successful in increasing the sales of products.
Beverages, particularly canned and bottled beverages, are sold in enormous quantities. Labels have long been associated with the sale of such beverages in the past, but all such labels known to the inventors have been based on printing an image over and over on all the labels for a certain product.
Virtually all of promotional approaches of this type are keyed to not changing the label, in fact the advertising firms insist on not changing the labels so that the product does not lose its purchaser base and purchaser recognition in the marketplace.
For these reasons plus cost considerations, the inventors do not know of the effective use of variable printing on beverage containers that involve both a static and variable part on the same label.
The present invention includes a beverage container with a label affixed thereto having a first static part and a second variable part including printing the image on the label using a single pass. The apparatus having a computer having memory to store a first static portion of an image and a second variable portion of an image so that a rasterizer connected to the memory and combining the first static portion and the second variable portion can form an image for printing. The apparatus also has a printer connected to the rasterizer for printing the image on a label in one step.
The printing method of the present invention can include printing a first side of the label using a static printing process, forming an image for printing a second side of the label such that the image has a fixed part and a variable part, rasterizing the image, printing the rasterized image on a second side of the label, printing a first side of a second label using the static printing process, retrieving the image for printing the second side of the label, changing the variable part, rasterizing the image and printing the rasterized image on the second side of the second label.